How to Leverage America’s Aging Workforce in Your Business

Posted by ebuckmir on Nov 16, 2016 in down to business | Comments Off on How to Leverage America’s Aging Workforce in Your Business

If you find that a number of the candidates looking for open placements in your organization lack the business expertise, interpersonal abilities, or overall expertise required for getting the work done… you’re not alone.

Many employers are running into a skills gap and it is costly. According to a study conducted for careerbuilder.com, a company loses more than $14,000 for each job that’s open for 3+ months.

As employers struggle to meet the challenge of hiring great talent, several are taking a look at ways to keep existing employees that are nearing retirement. In fact, in 2014 the Human Resource Management Foundation discussed this at their Executive Roundtable on “The Aging Workforce”.

In it, they discussed the fact that many older employees retain institutional knowledge and specific skills that extends their value to the organizations at risk of losing them. The challenge for anyone in a position to handle personnel issues is to find clever ways to retain those tenured employees while also leveraging them to help train and instill the correct corporate values in younger, newer employees.

One thought is to creatively work with older employees to help them change their work-life balance while retaining them as employees…

Phased-in Retirement

One option is to work with employees at or near retirement to create a less intense position by changing work hours and by emphasizing training others in the role. This allows them to ease into retired life while helping to ensure their knowledge and understanding of operations, clients, corporate culture, etc. are passed on.

Mentoring

Somewhat akin to this is creating specific mentorship programs where more seasoned workers can become an advisor to younger, newer employees. This again helps to facilitate transference of knowledge and expertise and affords more time to make sure that information is passed in an environment that maximizes success.

Recruitment

AARP offers a special program called Life Reimagined for Work (http://workreimagined.aarp.org/
) that helps companies find knowledgeable employees while also helping those professionals to connect with jobs and roles better suited to a lifestyle that is more aligned with near-retirement goals.

If you have members of your workforce that are over 50, this is the right time to begin thinking creatively about the future struggles you will likely face in recruitment and how you can extend the knowledge and value of existing older skilled employees so that they can continue being a part of your future growth as a company.

Benefits

One key area to explore is to offer benefits that are appealing to older workers. You can offer supplemental policies that cover gabs in Medicare for example. You can do the same with other benefits as well ranging from vision and dental to pet insurance. Often times these other benefit programs can be added in a way that offers affordable premiums to employees with minimal out-of-pocket expenses to the employer.

If you have a larger workforce, you may also want to consider adding a long-term care and / or long-term disability program with guaranteed issue. (This is important because guaranteed issue ensures folks can’t be turned down.) Sometimes it is difficult to pick up these benefits as an individual, so offer them as a company would make remaining as an employee extra attractive.

We highly recommend talking with your insurance professional to explore how a targeted benefits program can be included as a part of your total solution in retaining and leveraging older skilled employees.

All Parties Win

By creating a comprehensive program for eliminating a “skills gap” in younger / newer employees by capturing the knowledge and wisdom of your older employees, you address one of the single greatest problems that plagues most companies that fail to address these issues while benefitting yourself and your staff in the process.

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